Category: Books
*Hoop Atlas*
The author is Kirk Goldsberry, and the subtitle is Mapping the Remarkable Transformation of the NBA. I enjoyed this book very much, and the visual are excellent. The prose reads well, but also sticks to the analytical. Excerpt:
Over 80 percent of NBA 3s involve an assist. Typical 3-pointers are catch-and-shoot attempts that punctuate playmaking sequences that occur far away from the actual shot location, and that’s where James comes in. James is the NBA’s all-time leader in assisted 3s. He may never surpass John Stockton for total assists, but James has had his hand in more 3s than anyone else, period. He’s assisted on more 3s than Curry has made, and he’s had an outsized impact as a producer of corner 3. As a playmaker, James has extended what [Bruce] Bowen and the Spurs began.
…Six of the 10 most prolific corner-3 shooters of all time have been assisted by James, and that’s no coincidence.
…On the list of the NBA’s greatest scorers ever, James is the best playmaker, and it’s not close.
And this:
MJ was a durable player by any reasonable standard, but he ended up playing fewer career minutes than Jason Terry.
Recommended.
*Scarce and Valuable Economic Tracts*
Three big volumes, about 1800 pp., these books reprint the true classics behind the origins of economic thought. These are the best works of economics published before Adam Smith, and essentially they founded economic science. The originals were edited by the classical economist John Ramsay McCulloch, but they now have been reprinted by Classical Liberal Press. I don’t know of any comparably easy way to read these works, or anything close.
Here is one volume, here is another, here is a third. Each is priced below $20, definitely recommended.
*Shock Value: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy*
That is the new and very useful book by Carola Binder, mostly a very good economic history. Here is one excerpt:
The [Nixon price controls] were seen as necessary to support the third component of the Economic Stabilization Program, an expansionary fiscal package that included tax reductions to promote business recovery. The Council of Economic Advisers wrote in its annual report that “action to make fiscal policy more expansive had been limited by the need to avoid intensifying any inflationary expectations and stepping-up the inflation. The establishment of the direct wage-price controls created room for some more expansive measures, because it provided a certain degree of protection against both the fact and the expectation of inflation.”
The ties of the dollar to gold had been cut recently as well, as Bretton Woods turned into floating exchange rates. 1970s macro was a strange thing!
The book is recommended, you can pre-order here, most of American monetary history is covered.
Who was the wealthiest man in the world in the 1830s?
Wu Bingjian, better known in the west as ‘Houqua’, or sometimes ‘Howqua’, was the most successful Chinese merchant of his day. As leader of the Cohong (gonghang), the guild of Chinese traders that had been authorized in the late 18th century by the Qing court to oversee trade with Western merchants at Canton (Guangzhou), he was at once the richest man in the world. In 1834, Wu’s personal wealth was estimated at 26 million Mexican silver dollars (£6.24 million then, around (£680 million today). To put this wealth in perspective, the contemporary European financier Nathan Rotschild held capital equivalent to US $5.3 million (around £1.06 million) in 1828. Wu’s extraordinary ability to maintain a complex balance between his business interests, the Qing court and his Western partners, made him the most importnat player in Western countries’ trade with China for over half a century.
That is from the new and quite interesting Creators of Modern China: 100 Lives from Empire to Republic 1796-1912, edited by Jessican Harrison-Hall and Julia Lovell.
Economists’ predictions from 1980
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is the intro:
Out of curiosity, I recently cracked open The American Economy in Transition, published in 1980, edited by Martin Feldstein and including contributions from… Nobel-winning economists [Samuelson, Friedman, Kuznets], successful business leaders and notable public servants. Though most of the essays get it wrong, I found the book oddly reassuring
The problems the book describes truly are of a different era. On one hand, I was comforted to learn that many of these fears turned out to be unfounded. On the other, I am concerned that many current economists are not worried about the correct things.
How did they do in their analyses?:
For instance, many authors in the book are focused on capital outflow as a potential problem for the US economy. Today, of course, the more common concern is a possible excess inflow of foreign capital, combined with a trade deficit in goods and services. Another concern cited in the book is European economies catching up to the US. Again, that did not happen: The US has opened up its economic lead. Energy is also a major concern in the book, not surprisingly, given the price shocks of the 1970s. No one anticipates that the US would end up the major energy exporter that it is today.
Then there is the rise of China as a major economic rival, which is not foreseen — in fact, China is not even in the book’s index. Nether climate change nor global warming are mentioned. Financial crises are also given short shrift, as the US had not had a major one since the Great Depression. In 1980 the US financial sector simply was not that large, and the general consensus was that income inequality was holding constant. Nor do the economics of pandemics receive any attention.
So you may see why the book stoked my fears that today’s economists and analysts do not have a good handle on America’s imminent problems.
As for opportunities, as opposed to risks: The book contains no speculation about the pending collapse of the Soviet Union. Nor are the internet, crypto or artificial intelligence topics of discussion.
The column is interesting throughout. Milton Friedman for instance thought that the Fed would not find it politically profitable to fight inflation until inflation reached 25 percent. The best essay in the book was by Samuelson, who noted that such predictions usually misfire.
My Conversation with the excellent Coleman Hughes
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Coleman and Tyler explore the implications of colorblindness, including whether jazz would’ve been created in a color-blind society, how easy it is to disentangle race and culture, whether we should also try to be ‘autism-blind’, and Coleman’s personal experience with lookism and ageism. They also discuss what Coleman’s learned from J.J. Johnson, the hardest thing about performing the trombone, playing sets in the Charles Mingus Big Band as a teenager, whether Billy Joel is any good, what reservations he has about his conservative fans, why the Beastie Boys are overrated, what he’s learned from Noam Dworman, why Interstellar is Chris Nolan’s masterpiece, the Coleman Hughes production function, why political debate is so toxic, what he’ll do next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: How was it you ended up playing trombone in Charles Mingus Big Band?
HUGHES: I participated in the Charles Mingus high school jazz festival, which they still do every year. It was new at the time. They invite bands from all around to audition, and they identify a handful of good soloists and let them sit in for one night with the band. I sat in with the band, and the band leader knew that I lived close by in New Jersey, and so essentially invited me to start playing with the band on Monday nights.
I was probably 16 or 17 at this point, so I would take the NJ Transit into New York City on a Monday night, play two sets with the Mingus Band sitting next to people that had been my idols and were now my mentors — people like Ku-umba Frank Lacy, who is a fantastic trombone player; played with Art Blakey and D’Angelo and so forth. Then I would go home at midnight and go to school on Tuesday morning.
COWEN: Why is the music of Charles Mingus special in jazz? Because it is to me, but how would you articulate what it is for you?
Here is another:
COWEN: If I understand you correctly, you’re also suggesting in our private lives we should be color-blind.
HUGHES: Yes. Broadly, yes. Or we should try to be.
COWEN: We should try to be. This is where I might not agree with you. So I find if I look at media, I look at social media, I see a dispute — I think 100 percent of the time I agree with Coleman, pretty much, on these race-related matters. In private lives, I’m less sure.
Let me ask you a question.
HUGHES: Sure.
COWEN: Could jazz music have been created in a color-blind America?
HUGHES: Could it have been created in a color-blind America — in what sense do you mean that question?
COWEN: It seems there’s a lot of cultural creativity. One issue is it may have required some hardship, but that’s not my point. It requires some sense of a cultural identity to motivate it — that the people making it want to express something about their lives, their history, their communities. And to them it’s not color-blind.
HUGHES: Interesting. My counterargument to that would be, insofar as I understand the early history of jazz, it was heavily more racially integrated than American society was at that time. In the sense that the culture of jazz music as it existed in, say, New Orleans and New York City was many, many decades ahead of the curve in terms of its attitudes towards how people should live racially: interracial friendship, interracial relationship, etc. Yes, I’d argue the ethos of jazz was more color-blind, in my sense, than the American average at the time.
COWEN: But maybe there’s some portfolio effect here. So yes, Benny Goodman hires Teddy Wilson to play for him. Teddy Wilson was black, as I’m sure you know. And that works marvelously well. It’s just good for the world that Benny Goodman does this.
Can it still not be the case that Teddy Wilson is pulling from something deep in his being, in his soul — about his racial experience, his upbringing, the people he’s known — and that that’s where a lot of the expression in the music comes from? That is most decidedly not color-blind, even though we would all endorse the fact that Benny Goodman was willing to hire Teddy Wilson.
HUGHES: Yes. Maybe — I’d argue it may not be culture-blind, though it probably is color-blind, in the sense that black Americans don’t just represent a race. That’s what a black American would have in common — that’s what I would have in common with someone from Ethiopia, is that we’re broadly of the same “race.” We are not at all of the same culture.
To the extent that there is something called “African American culture,” which I believe that there is, which has had many wonderful products, including jazz and hip-hop — yes, then I’m perfectly willing to concede that that’s a cultural product in the same way that, say, country music is like a product of broadly Southern culture.
COWEN: But then here’s my worry a bit. You’re going to have people privately putting out cultural visions in the public sphere through music, television, novels — a thousand ways — and those will inevitably be somewhat political once they’re cultural visions. So these other visions will be out there, and a lot of them you’re going to disagree with. It might be fine to say, “It would be better if we were all much more color-blind.” But given these other non-color-blind visions are out there, do you not have to, in some sense, counter them by not being so color-blind yourself and say, “Well, here’s a better way to think about the black or African American or Ethiopian or whatever identity”?
Interesting throughout.
What should I ask Philip Ball?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is Wikipedia:
Philip Ball (born 1962) is a British science writer. For over twenty years he has been an editor of the journal Nature, for which he continues to write regularly. He is a regular contributor to Prospect magazine and a columnist for Chemistry World, Nature Materials, and BBC Future.
Ball holds a degree in chemistry from Oxford and a doctorate in physics from Bristol University.
He has written more science books than I can count (see Wikipedia), on a wide variety of topics, and I very much liked his latest book How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology. How many people have demonstrated a greater total knowledge of science than he has?
So what should I ask him?
What I’ve been reading
Benjamin Nathans, To The Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. The definitive book on its topic, consisting largely of profiles of dissidents. The title is taken from a longstanding dissident toast, and yet they won eventually, sort of. So your cause isn’t hopeless either.
Scott Hodge, Taxocracy: What You Don’t Know About Taxes & How They Rule Your Daily Life. An excellent short book on the power of tax incentives, written by the former head of the National Tax Foundation. Incentives matter!
Alex Christofi has written Cypria: A Journey to the Heart of the Mediterranean, which is the book I will take to Cyprus when I go there.
Randy Barnett, A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist, is a 616 pp. well-written memoir of a prominent libertarian legal theorist.
Gregory Makoff, Default: The Landmark Court Battle over Argentina’s $100 Billion Debt Restructuring. This is both a good book on how the law handles sovereign defaults and useful background to what Milei is trying to undo in Argentina.
I’ve also been reading a cluster of books on the history of the transgender movement. I don’t have a single go-to book to recommend, but you could start with Weininger and Magnus Hirschfeld, who are also interesting representatives of Austro-Hungarian and Germanic culture in the early twentieth century. Overall, I am surprised how many of the key books are out of print, selling used for high prices on Amazon.
*Native Nations*
The author is Kathleen Duval, and the subtitle is A Millennium in North America. This is an excellent book. Here is one excerpt, strung together by me from three separate pages:
By 1400, the cities of Cahokia, Moundville, and the Huhugam were abandoned. People continued to live nearby and, in many cases, continued to use the ruins as part of their ceremonies, but they no longer lived in the cities. Trade, religion, and politics became democratized, more the domain of the people. North America changed dramatically between 1200 and 1400, and the causes had nothing to do with Europeans.
Climate change, and The Little Ice Age, are the most likely culprits here:
The Little Ice Age was particularly hard on large, centralized agriculture-based cities around the world, including those of Cahokia, Moundville, and the Huhugam. In times of hardship and famine, leaders struggled to maintain their positinos, especiallly if they had claimed special powers over natural forces that were out of their control: rain, rivers, and tempereature. The urbanized settlments of North America were unable to deliver the healthand prosperity that people had enjoyed for generations. Now people saw conditions getting worse in their lifetimes: less food, more poverty, a declining future for their children…
Gradually, across Native North America, people developed a deep distrust of centralization, hierarchy, and inequality. The former residents of North America’s great cities reversed course, turning away from urbanization and political economic centralization to build new ways of living…
The first European explorers who crossed North America got a glimpse of this changing world.
I am excited to read the entire book.
What should I ask Paul Bloom?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is Wikipedia:
Paul Bloom…is a Canadian American psychologist. He is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University and Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on language, morality, religion, and art.
Here is Paul’s own home page. Here are Paul’s books on Amazon. Here is Paul on Twitter. Here is Paul’s new Substack. Here is Paul’s post on how to be a good podcast guest.
What should I ask Alan Taylor?
He is one of the greatest of living American historians, here is from Wikipedia:
Alan Shaw Taylor (born June 17, 1955) is an American historian and scholar who is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia. A specialist in the early history of the United States, Taylor has written extensively about the colonial history of the United States, the American Revolution and the early American Republic. Taylor has received two Pulitzer Prizes and the Bancroft Prize, and was also a finalist for the National Book Award for non-fiction.
He has a new and excellent book out, namely American Civil Wars: A Continental History 1850-1873. Among his other virtues, he is renowned for tying in American history to developments in Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. So what should I ask him?
Charlotta Stern and Fabio Rojas
Sociology and Classical Liberalism in Dialogue: Freedom is Something We Do Together
Direct link to pdf:
Michael Cook on Iran
Our primary concern in this chapter will be Iran, though toward the end we will shift the focus to Central Asia. We can best begin with a first-order approximation of the pattern of Iranian history across the whole period. It has four major features. The first is the survival of something called Iran, as both a cultural and a political entity; Iran is there in the eleventh century, and it is still there in the eighteenth. the second is an alternation between periods when Iran is ruled by a single imperial state and periods in which it break up intoa number of smaller states. The third feature is steppe nomad power: all imperial states based in Iran in this period are the work of Turkic or Mongol nomads. The fourth is the role of the settled Iranian population, whose lot is to pay taxes and — more rewardingly — to serve as bureaucrats and bearers of a literate culture. With this first-order approximation in mind, we can now move on to a second-order approximation in the form of an outline of the history of Iran over eight centuries that will occupy most of this chapter.
That is from his new book A History of the Muslim World: From its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity. I had not known that in the early 16th century Iran was still predominantly Sunni. And:
There were also Persian-speaking populations to the east of Iran that remained Sunni, and within Iran there were non-Persian ethnic groups, such as the Kurds in the west and the Baluchis in the southeast, that likewise retained their Sunnism. But the core Persian-speaking population of the country was by now [1722] almost entirely Shiite. Iran thus became the first and largest country in which Shiites were both politically and demographically dominant. One effect of this was to set it apart from the Muslim world at large, a development that gave Iran a certain coherence at the cost of poisoning its relations with its neighbors.
This was also a good bit:
Yet the geography of Iran in this period was no friendlier to maritime trade than it had been in Sasanian times. To a much greater extent than appears from a glance at the map, Iran is landlocked: the core population and prime resources of the country are located deep in the interior, far from the arid coastlands of the Persian Gulf.
In my earlier short review I wrote “At the very least a good book, possibly a great book.” I have now concluded it is a great book.
*The Carnation Revolution*
The author is Alex Fernandes, and the subtitle is The Day Portugal’s Dictatorship Fell. A very good and well-written book, here is one short excerpt:
The First Republic is sixteen years of unrelenting chaos, one that sets the scene for the fascist state that follows it. Between 1910 and 1926 Portugal goes through eight presidents and forty-five governments, all the while experiencing an economic crisis, crushing debt and the Europe-spanning threats of the First World War. Mirroring similar movements in France and Mexico, early Portuguese republicanism’s defining feature is its fierce anti-clericalism, imposing a crackdown on churches, convents and monasteries and persecuting religious leaders. The turbulent political landscape is marked by escalating acts of violence, militant strike action, periodic military uprisings and borderline civil war, the government fluctuating wildly between different republican factions.
Unfortunately, this book does not read as if it is about a niche topic. And don’t forget Salazar was an economist.
Robert Whaples reviews *GOAT*
An excellent piece, here is one excerpt I enjoyed in particular:
Cowen reads the John Maynard Keynes of The General Theory “as writing about an economy where uncertainty was much higher than usual, investment was highly unstable, fiscal policy was unable to fill in the gap, there was a risk or even reality of a downward spiral of prices and wages, monetary and exchange rate policies were out of whack, multipliers operate, the quest for savings could lower incomes overall, and the influence of liquidity factors on money demand and interest rates was especially high. All at once” (p. 72, emphasis in the original). In other words, Cowen drives home the point that this “general theory” isn’t actually general, it’s about very special, very unusual circumstances.
He considers Lord Keynes the GOAT contender whom he would most “want to hang around with” (p. 54). I had exactly the opposite reaction. The Keynes he portrays is virtually an egotistical monster. One who, for example, “kept an extended spreadsheet of his lovers and sexual encounters … each one rated by number” (p. 58). Anyone who treats other human beings this way—let alone writing it down—isn’t the kind of person I want to hang around with.
Recommended.